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Tuesday, 1 May 2018

Comment: Blaming the protesters

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter #64 (Summer 2018)]

From Peterloo 1819
to Gaza 2019

The author and beard wearer Michael Rosen has
commented on social media that when it comes to
protests when the authorities injure or kill
protesters, they invariably claim that the protesters
are to blame. Certainly that seems to be the official
reaction to deaths and injuries of Palestinian
protesters at the Gaza border on 30 March 2018.
We should be cautious about historical comparisons
because we can’t be sure we are really comparing
like with like. Each situation has its own specificity
yet even so Rosen’s general point has validity.
When the Manchester Yeomanry cut down and killed
and injured protesters for the vote at Peterloo in
central Manchester on 16 August 1819, the
authorities blamed this on fleeing protesters.
Still, that was a long time ago.
This is what E.P. Thompson wrote in The Making of
the English Working Class about protest and justice
at Peterloo:

If the Government was unprepared for the news of
Peterloo, no authorities have ever acted so vigorously
to make themselves accomplices after the fact.
Within a fortnight the congratulations of Sidmouth
(Home Secretary - KF) and the thanks of the Prince
Regent were communicated to the magistrates and
the military ‘for their prompt, decisive and efficient
measures for the preservation of the public peace’.
Demands for a parliamentary enquiry were
resolutely rejected. Attorney and Solicitor-Generals
were ‘fully satisfied’ as to the legality of the
magistrates’ actions. The Lord Chancellor (Eldon)
was of the ‘clear opinion’ that the meeting was an
‘overt act of treason’.. State prosecutions were
commenced, not against the perpetrators, but against
the victims of the day- Hunt, Saxton, Bamford and
others- and the first intention of charging them with
high treason was only abandoned with reluctance. If
the Manchester magistrates initiated the policy of
repression, the Government endorsed it with every
resource at its disposal.. Hay, the clerical magistrate
prominent on the Peterloo bench, was rewarded with
the £2,000 living of Rochdale.'

Interestingly on the 150th anniversary of Peterloo in
1969 the Sunday Telegraph repeated the point. Even
at that distance the reality of the massacre had to
be denied.
The Mandrake column (20 July 1969) was headed
‘The massacre that never was’.

Reviewing a new
book, Robert Walmsley’s Peterloo: the case
reopened (MUP) it noted ‘most of the day’s
comparatively few casualties were caused were
caused by a trampling panic amongst the crowd’.
That is a reassuring explanation, and even if not a
factual one, a reminder about how to spin
unfortunate events in the present day perhaps….